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Sunday, February 9, 2014

As of Today, H7N9 Avian Influenza Is Sixty-One TIMES More Infective than H5N1

One of the things that first drew our eye towards H7N9 was how much more infective it seemed to be than H5N1. The government has long exposed a fear of H5N1 turning into a mass killer of humanity. When killer human H7N9 first appeared in 2013, the government was quick to take notice. One of the first things that happened that gave away the Feds level of H7N9 concern was a MASSIVE over funding of the Vaccine Injury Trust Fund; that really grabbed our eye. Since then, the Feds have been prepping for H7N9 like it was the end of the world; they are even nationalizing the entire chain of command for Public Health response.

So now that H7N9 has been around for roughly a year, we have a chance to measure its functional rate of infectability using China's history of H5N1 detections vs the current level of H7N9 detections. Churning through those numbers, we conservatively calculate that H7N9 is 61 more times infective H5N1.

To make the comparison as apples to apples as possible, we limited H5N1's detection period to the post SARs timeframe when China's enhanced surveillance for Pneumonias of Unknown Etiology (PUE) took effect.

From 2005 through 2014, during a 98 month period China detected 44 H5N1 cases.

Ratioing the relative monthly infection rates, H7N9 comes out as 61 times as infective.

Frankly, H7N9 doesn't becoming immediately concerning to us until it becomes at least 1000 times more infective than H5N1. As it stands now, what has happened with H7N9 may have happened many, many times before, but went undetected because there was no PUE surveillance.

If the Chinese are even moderately forth coming with information, by May we should know if H7N9 is exponentially more infectious than H5N1. Our government expects that it will be.